A yearlong project examining local news on Twitter in three cities showed that national news and other content far outpaced local news on the platform. In addition, keywords about local news were virtually impossible to find with frequency, according to a report by the Pew Research Center.

While noting that Twitter analysis is still in the experimental stage and that its data has limitations, research associate Kenneth Olmstead said Twitter could be a valuable tool for understanding the media environment, specifically how news organizations use it.

The study, conducted last year in Denver, Sioux City, Iowa and Macon, GA., used several different approaches to understand how the platform is used as a source of news that prompts local residents to participate. Pew recently released an in-depth report on the news ecologies of the three localities.

The report found that what little local news was being shared on Twitter was often different from what was being covered by news outlets in each city. For example, in Macon, the most shared story on Twitter by far was about a local band that had made it into a contest on VH1. This story was hardly covered at all in the mainstream press during the week studied.